“Father!” Miriamele’s voice was faint, but her face was contorted with terror.
“Because it is time, Majesty,” the alchemist said. “You are changing. Your mortality must be scorched away by clean flame.” He pointed at the princess. “Look, Elias! Do you see what your weakness does to you? Do you see what the sham of love would bring you? She would make you into an old man, sobbing for your meals, pissing in your bed!”
The king straightened up and turned his back on Miriamele. “I will not be held down,” he gritted. Every word seemed an effort. “I will … take … what was promised.”
Simon saw that the priest was smiling, though sweat trickled down his egg-smooth brow. “You will have it.” He lifted his arms once more. Simon strained until he thought veins would burst in his temples, but could not pull free from the crossed swords. “In your brother’s stronghold, Elias,” Pryrates said, “in what was the very heart of his treachery—at Naglimund we build the Fourth House!”
Simon again saw the unfamiliar black sky framed in the window. At the bottom of the sill, the Hayholt had become a forest of pale, graceful towers. Flames ran among them. The strange sight did not vanish. The Hayholt was gone, replaced by … Asu’a? Simon heard shrieking Sithi voices echoing, and the roar of flames.
“And now the Fifth House!” cried Pryrates.
The tolling of the phantom bell this time brought back Simon’s view of storm clouds and whirling snow. The high-pitched anguish of the Sithi gave way to the dulled shouts of mortals.
“In the Pool of Three Depths, Utuk’ku gives way to the last of the Storm King’s servitors, and beneath us the fifth and final House is created.” Pryrates spread his arms, palms down, and the whole tower trembled. A kind of sucking pull reached down the length of Bright-Nail, through Simon’s arm, tugging at his heart and even his thoughts as though it sought to draw them out whole. Across from him, Camaris bared his teeth in an agonized grimace, Thorn quivering in his fist.
A fountain of icy blue light sprang up through the floor of the bellchamber, roaring and crackling as it passed through the blackness where the swords touched. Diminished and distorted by that passage, it continued up past Simon’s face and spattered the glinting ceiling with blue sparks. Simon felt his body convulsing as tremendous energies flowed around him and through him. Inside his battered thoughts the swords thrilled exultantly, their spirits released. He tried to open his mouth and scream, but his jaws were locked tight, teeth grinding. The coruscating blue light filled his eyes.
“And now the three Great Swords have found their way to this place, beneath the Conqueror Star. Sorrow, defender of Asu’a, scourge of the living; Thorn, star-blade, banner of the dying Imperium; Bright-Nail, last iron from the vanished West.”
As Pryrates called each name, the great bell rang. The tower and all around it seemed to shift with each sounding, the delicate towers and flames giving way to the squat, snow-covered roofs of the Hayholt, then appearing once more with the next reverberating clang.
Caught in the grip of terrible forces, Simon felt himself burning from within. He hated. Smoldering clouds of rage rose up inside him, hatred at being tricked, at seeing his friends murdered, at the terrible devastation that Pryrates and Elias had caused. He wanted to swing the sword in a deadly arc, to smash everything in sight, to kill those who had made him so horribly unhappy. He could not shriek—he could not even move except to twitch helplessly. The rage, ordinary escape blocked, seemed to pour out through his sword arm instead. Bright-Nail became a blur, something not quite real, as though part of it had gone away. Thorn was a dark smear in Camaris’ hands. The old man’s eyes had rolled up in his head.
Simon felt his monstrous anger and despair break free. The blackness where the swords met widened, an unending emptiness, a gate into Unbeing, and Simon’s hate poured into it. The void began to crawl up Thorn’s length toward Elias.
“We harness the great fear.” Pryrates moved to a spot behind the king, who now seemed as trapped and helpless as the other two swordbearers. The priest spread his arms wide, so that for a moment Elias seemed to have another pair of hands. “In every land, the fear has spread. The kilpa make the seas boil. The ghants crawl through the streets of the southern cities. The beasts of legend stalk the snows of the north. The fear is everywhere.
“We harness the great fear. In every land, brother is turned against brother. Plague and famine and the scourge of war turn people into raging demons.
“All the strength of fright and fury is ours, funneled through the pattern of the Five Houses.” Suddenly Pryrates laughed. “You are all such small minds! Even your terrors are small ones. You feared to see your armies defeated? You will see more than that. You will see Time itself roll backward in its rut.”
King Elias jerked and twitched as the blackness crawled up the blade toward him, but he seemed unable to release Sorrow. “God help me, Pryrates!” A convulsive shudder ran through him, a tremor of such power that he should have fallen to the floor. The nightdark void touched his hands. “Aaaah! God help me, I am burning up! My soul is on fire!”
“Surely you did not think it would be easy?” Pryrates was grinning. Sweat sheeted down his forehead. “It will get worse, you fool.”
“I do not wish immortality!” Elias screamed. “Ah, God, God, God! Release me! I am burning away!” His voice was distorted, as though some inconceivable thing had invaded his lungs and chest.
“What you wish is not important,” Pryrates spat back. “You will have your immortality—but it may not be all you had hoped.”
Elias writhed. His shrieks were wordless now.
Pryrates extended his hands until they hovered on either side of Sorrow’s hilt, only inches from Elias’ own fingers. “It is time for the Words of Unmaking,” he said.
The bell thundered, and once more Green Angel Tower was surrounded by the tragic delicacy of burning Asu’a. The stars in that black sky were cold and tiny as snowflakes. The tower seemed to shake like an agonized living thing.
“I have prepared the way!” Pryrates called. “I have crafted the vessel. Now, in this place, let Time turn backward! Roll back the centuries to the moment before Ineluki was banished to the realms beyond death. As I speak the Words of Unmaking, let him return! Let him return!” He lapsed into a bellowing chant in a language harsh as shattering stone, as cracking ice. The blackness spread out over Elias and for a moment the king vanished utterly, as though he had been pushed through the wall of reality. Then he seemed to absorb the blackness, or it flowed into him; he reappeared, thrashing and shrieking incoherently.
Elysia, Mother of Mercy! They’ve won! They’ve won! Simon’s head seemed full of storm winds and flame, but his heart was black ice.
Once more the bell caroled, and this time the very air of the chamber seemed to grow solid and glassy, bending Simon’s gaze as though he looked through a mirrored tunnel. There seemed no up or down. Outside, the stars began to smear across the sky in long white threads, tangling like wormholes in sod. Even as his life bled from him and out of Bright-Nail in searing waves, he felt the world turning inside out.
The bellchamber grew dark. Distorted shadows loomed and shifted across the icy chamber, then the walls seemed to open and fall away. Blackness flowed through, bringing with it a deeper chill, a freezing, ultimate cold.
Elias’ agonized screams had become a choking near-silence. He and Pryrates were now the only things visible. The priest’s hands flickered with yellow light; his face gleamed. All the warmth of the world was leaking away.
The king began to change.
Elias’ silhouette bent and shifted, growing monstrously, even though his own contorted form was somehow still visible in the center of the darkness.
The deadening chill was inside Simon, too, seeping in where the flames of his fury had burned away his hope. His life was being drawn out of him, sucked clean like marrow from a bone.
The cold, cold thing that had waited so long was coming.
“
Yes, you will live forever, Elias,” intoned Pryrates. “But it will be as a flitting shadow within your own body, a shadow dwarfed by Ineluki’s bright flame. You see, even with the wheel of Time turned backward in its track and all the doors opened to Ineluki once more, his spirit must have an earthly home.”
The sounds of the storm outside had ceased, or could no longer penetrate through the strange forces that clutched the bellchamber. The fountain of blue light flowing upward from the Pool had narrowed to a silent stream that vanished into the blackness of the swords’ joining and did not reemerge. When Pryrates had finished, there was no sound in the dark room but the rapid chuffing of the king’s breath. Scarlet flames kindled in the depths of Elias’ eyes, then his head rocked back as though his neck had snapped. Vaporous red light leaked from his mouth.
Simon watched in horror; through the swords he could feel the way being opened, just as Pryrates had said. Something too horrible to exist was forcing its way through into the world. The king’s body jerked like a child’s doll dangling on a string. Smoldering light seemed to spring forth from him everywhere, as though the very fabric of his body was fraying apart, revealing some burning thing beneath.
Somewhere Miriamele was screaming; her small, lost voice seemed to come from the other end of the universe.
The bellchamber was gone. All around, angles as strange as if reflected in broken mirrors, stood Asu’a’s needle towers. They burned as the king’s body burned, crumbled as Time itself was crumbling. Five centuries were sliding away into the frozen black void. Nothing would be left but ashes and stone and Ineluki’s utter triumph.
“Come to us, Storm King!” shouted Pryrates. “I have made the way. The Words of Unmaking release the power of the swords, and Time turns withershins. History is undone! We shall write it anew!”
Elias writhed, and writhing grew larger, as though whatever filled him was too large for any mortal form and stretched him almost to the point of bursting. A suggestion of antlers flickered on the king’s brow, and his eyes were pits of shifting, molten scarlet. His outline wavered, a moving tide of shadow that made it impossible to discern his true shape. The king’s arms parted. One hand still held the elusive blur of nothingness that had been Sorrow; the other hand extended and the fingers spread, black as charred sticks. Emberlight played in the creases.
The thing paused, flickering and shifting. It seemed saggingly weary, like a butterfly newly emerged from a cocoon.
Pryrates took a step back and averted his face. “I have … I have done what you asked, mighty one.” His smug grin was gone: the priest had willingly opened the door, but what had entered shocked even him. He took a deep breath and appeared to find some core of strength. His face again became feral. “The hour is come—but it is not your hour, it is mine. How could I trust one who hated every living thing to keep its bargain? I knew that once you had no need of me, your promises would be wind in darkness.” He spread his wide-sleeved arms. “Mortal I may be, but I am no fool. You gave me the Words of Changing, thinking them a toy that would keep me childishly amused as I did your bidding. But I have learned, too. Those Words will become your cage, and then you will be my servant. All creation will bend to you—but you will bow to me!”
The unstable thing at the room’s center eddied like blown smoke, but its black, scarlet-streaming heart remained solid. Pryrates began to chant loudly in something only recognizable as language because of the empty spaces between noises. The alchemist seemed to change, reeling in the red-shot darkness that surrounded the king like a fog; his limbs curled and snapped in a ghastly, serpentine way, then he faded into a coiling shadow, a wide rope of blackness that drifted around the place where the king or whatever had devoured him now stood. The shadowy coils tightened around the smoldering heart. The world seemed to bend farther inward, distorting the two shapes until only flame and steam and darkness pulsed at the center of the bellchamber.
The whole of creation seemed to collapse in on this place, on this moment. Simon felt his own terror surge out, crackling through his arms, through Bright-Nail and into the midst of the clotted dark.
The blackness bulged. Tiny arcs of lightning flickered about the room. Somewhere outside, Simon knew, the Asu’a of five centuries before was burning, its inhabitants dying at the hands of Fingil’s long-dead army. And what of everyone else? Was all Simon knew gone, borne away by Time’s circling wheel?
The lightnings jittered about the chamber. Something pulsed at the center, a storm of fire and thunderheads that suddenly gaped, filling the room with blinding light. Pryrates, his real form restored, staggered backward out of the beating radiance, which promptly collapsed back into shadow. For a moment the priest raised his arms triumphantly over his head, then he teetered and dropped to his knees. A vaguely manlike form coalesced out of the darkness and stood over him, a scarlet suggestion of a face fluttering atop its misshapen head.
Pryrates shuddered and wept. “Forgive me! Forgive my arrogance, my foolishness! Oh, please, Master, forgive me!” He crawled toward the thing, banging his forehead against the almost invisible floor. “I can still do you great service! Remember what you promised me, Lord—that if I served you well I would be first among mortals.”
The thing retained its grip on shifting Sorrow, but extended its other blackened hand until it touched the alchemist. The fingers cupped his smooth wet head. A voice more powerful than the bell, as ragged and deadly as the hiss of freezing wind, scraped through the darkness. Despite everything else that had happened, Simon’s eyes filled with frightened tears at the sound of it.
“YES. YOU WILL BE FIRST.”
Jets of steam lifted from beneath the king’s fingers. Pryrates shrieked and threw up his arms, grabbing at the hand, but the king did not move and Pryrates could not free himself. Runnels of flame sped down the alchemist’s robe. Above him, the king’s face was an indistinct lump of darkness, but eyes and ragged mouth blazed scarlet. The priest’s scream was a sound no human throat should have loosed. Vapors enveloped him, but Simon saw his threshing arms steaming, cracking, shriveling into waggling things like tree limbs. After a long moment, the priest, all bones and burning tatters, fell to the floor and twitched like a smashed cricket. The jerking movements slowed, then stopped.
The thing that had been Elias slumped, head down, so that nothing could be seen of it but shadow. Still, Simon could feel it drinking the energies that raced through Bright-Nail, Thorn, and Sorrow, regaining the strength to control its stolen body. Pryrates had hurt it, somehow, but Simon could sense that it would be only the work of moments before it recovered. He felt a tiny flutter of hope, and tried to let go of his sword hilt, but it was as much a part of him as his arm. There was no escape.
As though it sensed his attempt to break free, the black thing looked up at him, and even as his heart stumbled and almost failed, he could glean its implacable thought. It had smashed Time itself to return. Even the mortal priest, no matter what powers he had wielded, would not have been allowed to close the door again—what possible chance could Simon have?
In this moment of horror, Simon suddenly felt the shock of the dragon blood that had once scorched his flesh and changed him. He stared at the unsteady black shape that had been Elias, the ruined husk and its fiery occupant, and felt an answering stab of pain where the dragon’s black essence had scarred him. Through the pulsing unlight that moved between Bright-Nail and Sorrow, Simon felt not only the all-consuming hatred that had been the blood of the Storm King’s deathly exile, but also Ineluki’s terrible, mad loneliness.
He loved his people, Simon thought. He gave his life for them but did not die.
Staring helplessly across the short distance between them, watching as the thing regathered its strength, Simon remembered the vision Leleth had shown him of Ineluki beside the great pool. Such shattering unhappiness had been in that face, but the determination had been a mirror of Eahlstan’s as he had sat in his chair and waited for the terrible worm he knew he must meet, the dragon t
hat he knew would slay him. They were somehow the same, Ineluki and Eahlstan, doing what must be done, though life itself was the price. And Simon was no different.
Sorrow. His thoughts flittered and died like moths in a flame, but he clung to this one. Ineluki named his sword Sorrow. Why did she show me that?
Something was moving at the edge of his vision. Binabik and Miriamele, freed by Pryrates’ death, reeled a few steps forward, Miriamele fell to her knees. Binabik staggered closer, head held low as though he walked into a powerful wind.
“You will destroy this world,” the troll gasped. Although his mouth was stretched wide, his words seemed quiet as the whir of velvety wings. “You have lost your belonging, Ineluki. There will be nothing for your governing. You do not belong here!”
The clot of darkness turned to look at him, then raised a flickering hand. Simon, seeing Binabik quail before the destroying touch, felt his fear and hatred rise anew. He fought against that surge of loathing, although he did not know why.
Hatred kept him alive in the dark places. Five centuries, burning in emptiness. Hatred is all he has. And I have hated, too. I have felt like him. We are the same.
Simon struggled to keep the image of the living Ineluki’s suffering face before him. That was the truth beneath this horrible, burning thing. No creature in all the cosmos deserved what had happened to the Storm King.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the face in his memory. “You should not have suffered so.”
The surge of energy from Bright-Nail suddenly grew less. The thing that held Sorrow turned back to him, and waves of terror broke over Simon again. His heart was being crushed.
“No,” he gasped, and groped inside himself for a solid place to stand and live. “I will … fear you, but I … will not hate you.”
There came a still instant that seemed like years. Then Sir Camaris rose slowly from his knees and stood, swaying. In his hands, Thorn still throbbed with blackness, but Simon felt the drain of its forces weaken, as though what he himself felt had somehow run down through the point of connection into Camaris as well.